152 Main St., Ridgefield, CT

ONLY A FEW SEATS LEFT!...join us for Poems as Time Machines, a generative writing workshop with 2025 Pulitzer Prize Finalist Danez Smith! Says Danez of the workshop: "Since the beginning of time we’ve been obsessed with time. How does it move? How are we held within it? How can we move in and out of it? In this workshop we’ll read a sampling of poets going forward, backwards, and deeper into time before designing our own machines (hint: it’s poems) that will move us across the timeline to discover what waits for us and our ambitions if we dive into the stream and let it carry us further into our imaginations."

“[Smith’s] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy.” —The New Yorker 

Danez Smith burst into national recognition in 2014, when their poems about the Black Lives Matter movement found piercing resonance in a time of social and political change. They are the author of Bluff, Finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize and an NAACP Image Award nominee; Homie, which won the Minnesota Book Award and was a Finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the NAACP Image Award; Don't Call Us Dead, Finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Forward Prize; [insert] Boy, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; and two chapbooks. Most recently, Smith edited Blues in Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes.

In poetry slam, Smith was a 2011 Individual World Poetry Slam finalist and the reigning two-time Rustbelt Individual Champion, and was on the 2014 championship team Sad Boy Supper Club.

You can enjoy "Dinosaurs in the Hood," one of Danez's best-known spoken-word performances, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJwiOTeKDOQ